Ranked first on the 2010 Mo Ibrahim Index of Governance, Mauritius enjoys projecting itself as a model to be emulated by the rest of Africa. We are in fact inundated by a sea of indices these days – The Global Integrity Index, the Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index, the Happiness Index, the World Bank Governance indicators (to mention but a few). Yet these indices and their associated rankings can be quite misleading at times. Tunisia ranked 7th and Senegal ranked 12th on the 2010 Ibrahim index but both countries have experienced important riots and protests highlighting the limits of the index and the diffi culties of measuring governance. The latter is much more complex than simply picking on a few indicators and giving arbitrary weights. Also, fi nding the balance between objectivity and subjectivity is no easy task.

The young Mohamed Boazizi, the educated vegetable Tunisian fruit seller who burnt himself to death in a recent past, triggering the Arab spring and causing mayhem on the streets of Tunis, should serve as a stark reminder of how oppressive and devoid of opportunities certain regimes can be. More recently, the young people of Senegal have started taking to the streets as well and this despite relatively good rankings for both countries. The current uprisings should be studied by those who believe that riots, chaos and anarchy can be triggered by the revelations of one’s caste identity.

Some years back, I was described by some as a bird of bad omen, when just a couple of weeks before the 1999 riots, I gave a press interview, and indicated that Mauritius would go ablaze again. In fact, I was prescient enough. The sociological readings – interpretations of those riots can take multiple forms but one commonality is that the working class was and is still going through a severe sort of alienation. The 1999 riots, with a few dead, and substantive damage being done to both state and private property, serve to show that social cohesion and peace cannot be taken for granted.

• Beyond a reductionist approach to the question
The tendency to overlook the multiple identities that any human being has and to try and classify individuals according to a single allegedly caste and/or religious identity is an aberration which has no place in modern enlightened society. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen in his work ‘Identity and Violence’ aptly reminds us that the world is made much more incendiary by the advocacy and popularity of single dimensional categorization of human beings and that we should learn to depart from this route. It is perhaps useful to also quote Ronald Niebuhr (1932) who argued that ‘as individuals men believe that they ought to love and serve each other and establish justice between each other. As racial, economic and national groups, they take for themselves whatever their power can command.’ Some peoples’ positions command certain levels of power but when the latter leads to distorted thinking and misguiding a population, there may be grave danger ahead.

Also, when power appropriated by a few assists in the growing asymmetry in the distribution of entitlements, the widening chasms between the rich and the poor, unemployment and loss of livelihoods, land speculation leading to the downtrodden being stripped of any asset building potential it will more than likely sow the seeds for greater polarization and fracture. It is not simply one’s identity and/or caste identity per se which causes the volcano to erupt. In addition to the structural causes mentioned here, there can be other triggers to violence, such as ‘autodafes’ (the burning of ‘l’express’ is still vivid in the minds of many) as well as the excessively communal address of some other influential people, a couple of months back, particularly around Labour Day. Peace, as Martin Luther King, notes, is not about the absence of confl icts but the presence of justice. The latter comes in many ways but if a nation’s past wounds are not healed, and the nation is not reconstructed and reconciled, it may be very diffi cult to obtain both peace and justice.

• The Truth and Justice Commission and the Right to Know
The setting up of the Truth and Justice commission is perhaps a right approach within the country’s overall effort to reconcile the nation, but in the absence of the long promised ‘freedom of information act’, it is vital that all stakeholders realize the importance of enabling researchers access information in order build on knowledge that can assist in improving the human condition.

Reconstruction and reconciliation of our society depend largely on pushing for greater accountability and transparency – the incoherence of policies at various levels is also a reflection of lack of accurate data, amongst many other things. Research within the broad field of social sciences and historiography depend largely on the availability of accurate and relevant information.

In Mauritius, getting information remains a daunting task and the kind of gymnastics one has to do, to access some information is beyond one’s imagination.

• Business Facilitation Act v/s Freedom Information Act and Knowledge Production
What has happened recently between the MGI and the TJC highlights some of the difficulties associated with doing research, but there are numerous other cases where one is simply told that such and such reports are confi dential and therefore not accessible to researchers. For a country which is striving to promote research- (the setting up of national research chairs etc) to become a knowledge hub, it is important that it puts a brake on the kind of refl exes that have been displayed recently regarding access to information.

Knowledge production and dissemination will suffer a severe blow if such reflexes persist, all the more in a context where there is an absence of information fl ow and the citizenry is waiting patiently for the ‘most well governed’ country in the continent to get rid of its ‘opacity politics’ and move towards a genuine deepening of democracy. The freedom of information act is necessary but not sufficient.

It is certainly not enough to build more campuses to allow more tertiary institutions in, without ensuring either quality and/or access to information. The Business Facilitation Act would facilitate the massification and commodification of knowledge but would certainly not facilitate quality knowledge production and dissemination, let alone to assist in ranking our universities amongst the top and even middle performers.

• Conclusion
Our shared humanity gets savagely challenged when our differences are narrowed into one devised system of uniquely powerful categorizations. The reductionist approach to identity, particularly along caste lines, should be jettisoned. Developing a sense of belonging and nationalism demands that we know, understand and appreciate the ‘other’ and that opportunities exist for all.

The multiplicity of crises that the world is confronted with brings new challenges in their wake - challenges which can more easily divide than unite, so leaders should be wary of these and do everything possible to promote more justice and social harmony. For this to happen, Ethics should be central to governance but sadly, this has become somewhat of a rare commodity these days.